I’m excited to share with you our upcoming change project together with North Europe’s biggest documentary film festival: CPH:DOX. Do write me if you want to join or support this amazing initiative – lots of exciting possibilities for brands and organisations.

How can the world’s most inspiring artists and storytellers unite with businesses and organizations to accelerate change?

Mission
Under the parole change and the categories “art x tech x education x change” we want to connect the world’s most innovative and impactful change projects with like-minded businesses and organizations applying their power and marketing reach to inspire and accelerate change.

Why
Think about what can be achieved when you partner with the world’s best artists, storytellers and change makers to create a difference for people or the planet? When projects from the creative arts (music, film, art, media etc.) meet with the transformative powers of education and technology, change
happens. What if we could scale up this change by connecting the more innovative and impactful projects with like-minded businesses and organizations with a muscle to fund, distribute, promote and ultimately accelerate change?

How
CPH:CHANGE will do an annual call for submissions looking for the most innovative, inspiring and impactful change projects within the creative arts and ideally with a tech or educational edge. 5 projects will be selected to be part of a pitching session in front of an invited audience of businesses, organizations and corporate brands (invitation based on relevance for projects). The aim is to match-make projects with potential businesses and organizations to harvest shared value while making the project grow in terms of scalability either through funding, distribution, marketing, copromotion, network or similar support.

CPH:CHANGEart x tech x education x change

When
CPH:CHANGE will take place during the afternoon on the 10th of November 2015 as part of the CPH:DOX industry platform. The selected projects will be presented to a wide range of industry experts followed by a 20 min feedback/discussion session from a customised panel of experts.

What
To cover the many aspects of CPH:CHANGE we encourage cross disciplinary thinking and would like to engage with VP’s or directors from your business/organization responsible for:·Content marketing/sponsorship·Marketing/advertising··Sustainability/CSR

CPH:DOX is one of Europe’s largest documentary film
festival, which each November fills Copenhagen’s
cinemas with more than 200 films from all over
the world. The films are distributed among four
international competition series and a number
of thematic programmes, which focus on current
political and cultural issues. In the crossroads
between genres and media, CPH:DOX each
year creates new perspectives on creativity and
interdisciplinary thinking between films, the media,
art and music something that’s strongly reflected over
the 11-day program.

Thomas Kolster,Sustainability Expert, Goodvertising Agency

Thomas is the author of the book “Goodvertising”;
the most comprehensive book to date exploring
communication as a force for good. As the Director of
the Goodvertising Agency, he’s helping companies,
non-profits and agencies understand this new reality
and always looking for ways to disrupt. Last year
Thomas founded WhereGoodGrows; the world’s first
best-practice platform for sustainable initiatives. He’s
an experienced keynote speaker, a steady columnist
for the Guardian and several other publications and
a regular judge at international award shows. The
Huffington Post recently dubbed him “Inspirational
Leader”.

In the newly released ‘Sustainerati 2015‘ published by Sustainly, Thomas Kolster is named on of the top sustainability ‘thinkers, commentators & aggregators”.

The publication descrition reads as follows:

To understand how sustainability is evolving (and to understand how to communicate it) you have to have a full picture of the issues, innovation, reputation risks and storytelling.That’s why this year’s Sustainly Sustainerati looks beyond the traditional strongholds of sustainability and CSR experts in order to provide a more expansive view of how sustainability is influencing and being influenced by the greater world of business.These are the thought leaders, media mavens, opinion formers, brand ambassadors, future gazers and sharing, printing, connecting and making innovators who command our Twitter attention.

What happens when you’re met by trust or mistrust? We set out to explore this simple question in a trust experiment with twins.

The results speak for themselves. The video was made to spark a wider debate in Denmark about trust in society in general and specifically to question how we treat people without a work: Trust and support or mistrust and control? Unemployment is an important topic around the world, so how do we create the right foundation for bringing people back in work?
The video was done for the Danish unemployment fund Min A-kasse and made by The Goodvertising Agency. For further comments or interview requests please do reach out.

An interactive and playful keynote and workshop session (Read: Playshop) that helps your business or (personal) brand develop meaningful conversations and engaged evangelists. You might be an ice cream business whose fans know you for your tongue-in-cheek updates about your newest, finger licking flavours or a social entrepreneur with a burning purpose to change the world one-diaper-at-a-time. No matter what you’ll be challenged to leave your comfort zone on a quest to stand for something using two approaches driven by either intellect or passion. Experience this clash of worlds: the accountant versus the activist, Milton Friedman versus Richard Branson, rationale versus ideals, brain versus heart. This sustainability, marketing and conscious leadership tag-team will take the audience on a journey of new thought processes and challenge you to find your voice on the mind – heart continuum and think creatively about your business’ role and its voice on Planet Social. The session is relevant for both beginners and advanced, entrepreneurs and corporate brands. Presentation will be in English and the workshop a combination of Danish and English.

Julian Borra of the Thin Air Factory and Thomas Kolster, author of Goodvertising, provided another immensely entertaining and engaging presentation from SB ’14 London’s main stage in Tuesday’s afternoon brief session. Every footballing cliché in the book was employed to warm up the expectant audience, and we weren’t disappointed.

This sustainability tag-team took us on a journey towards new thought processes in problem-solving. They pointed out that innovation for sustainability is often more about the way the innovation process is approached and managed, rather than the innovation itself. To illustrate this view, the team offered two thought-provoking quotes:
What you cannot measure, you cannot change. – Jochen Zeitz, Keering

I don’t think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think. – Zaha Hadid

So in addition to asking, ‘What are the barriers to sustainability innovation?’ Borra and Kolster also asked, ‘What’s the answer? How can we alter our mindsets and adopt alternative ways of working to overcome the barriers preventing us achieving our goals?’

Session illustration by SmartUp Visuals. Click to enlarge.
After a four-minute discussion on the subject, thoughts from the crowd included:
• Co-creation
• Making Marketing understand the ‘why’
• Understanding your target group
• Better formats of collaboration
• Raising conversations to a senior level
• Making messages more visual and tangible

Warming to the task, Borra then invited us to think differently by introducing the concepts of ‘Punks’ and ‘Wonks’ (I’ll assume we all know ‘Punk’, but for those ‘Wonk-unfamiliar,’ it’s a term for an intellectual expert, a studious or hard-working person.) To further illustrate the point, Borra then flashed a picture of two collaborative but highly contrasting personalities from the music archives – David Bowie and Brian Eno.
On the one hand, Bowie – the dynamic, ad-lib, quirky musical genius; the artist with the ability to reinvent himself every few years. On the other, Eno – the solid, reliable, music scientist; the professional but highly creative producer, guide, background thinker, controller.

Individually, Borra explained, the pair are brilliant in their own ways. But together (when creating what went on to become critically acclaimed and groundbreaking albums), they either clashed horribly when they got it wrong, or combined beautifully when they got it right. When they reached an impasse through creative block, or differences of opinion on how to approach an issue (or maybe just stubbornness), the answer was to take the issues offline, disengage and find an alternative way of the approaching the problem. This didn’t always work, but often did. And when it did, the results were stunning.

Borra then suggested that, by taking a cue from this successful Punk and Wonk collaboration and adopting one of these two different yet equally inspirational behavior types, alternative approaches to sustainability can be revealed. Barriers to innovation can be stripped away. Bleak and obscure dilemmas can be unlocked through strategy re-thinks.

Audience exercises asked everyone to decide whether they were natural Punks or Wonks, and then to adopt the alternative position in their approach. This simple 5-minute exercise proved engaging, thought-provoking, and deceptively effective; it’s about adopting an alternative mindset before developing effective thought processes, and getting comfortable doing it.

Of course, not everyone contributing to the sustainability agenda is either capable or willing to adopt radically alternative thought processes in the quest for successfully developing the innovation we need. But to Borra and Kolster’s main point, innovation for sustainability is a game of two ‘halves.’ There is always another way to approach a problem, and alternative but complementary thinking is often the most effective route to successful solutions.

Most brands are still scarily silent about the difference they want to make in our lives and yet hope we won’t notice them force-feeding us with advertising-as-usual until they produce consumer foie gras. This is in stark contrast to what people expect of brands today: According to Havas’ Meaningful Brands Survey findings, 71 percent of people globally want brands to solve some of society’s biggest challenges such as unemployment, climate change, etc. Then why are brands still so silent? Why does there still seem to be an insurmountable wall between sustainability and marketing?

As in most struggles or conflicts, the answer is often hidden in the differences between the two parties: Languages, views, race, gender or backgrounds. It’s when sustainability meets marketing (or the other way around) that the problem arises — essentially marketing and sustainability people do not speak the same languages and they don’t have the same qualifications, only adding to the gap of sometimes planetary dimensions: Marketing is from Mars and sustainability is from Venus.

Life on Planet Sustainability and Planet Marketing
On Planet Sustainability they care about facts and science: It’s about exploring supply chains, measuring the amount of carbon emissions in Brussels sprouts (remember to add the fart factor!), and there are endless discussions about materiality. On Planet Marketing it’s quite the opposite: It’s about emotions, feelings, purpose — and the language is often more about fiction than facts. In sustainability, everything is complex and analysis is key. There are often no simple answers and it’s no longer about cradle to grave; oh, nooo — it’s now actually about cradle to cradle. Conversely, in marketing, simplicity and emotion are key — so it’s easy to communicate a message people can internalise and act on.

The overall goals of marketing are sales and building brands, which are often measured in monetary value, brand recognition and similar. In sustainability, it’s about doing things smarter to limit or eradicate negative impact and build a prosperous planet, which can rarely be measured one uniform way – again, more complexity. For each of us wearing either the sustainability or the marketing hat, these differences can lead to frustrations, misunderstandings and unfortunately in many cases campaigns or branding attempts with more style than substance (something sustainability people will quickly dub ‘greenwashing.’)

A balancing act
I’ve seen my fair share of campaigns where the pendulum either went too far towards sustainability or too far towards marketing. Sustainability is often a numbers game and numbers coupled with scientific abbreviations aren’t making the message any easier to read. Who knows if a car advert touting 184g/km CO2 is environmentally friendly or not? (HINT: The average target set by the European Union for 2015 is 130 g/km.) In marketing, it’s about understanding the target group and translating the message into something actionable.
If the target group don’t care much about nature, then focus on money — like in a VW ad for its BlueMotion technology, redacting parts of its long message with strikethroughs to simply communicate: BlueMotion saves you money. If your target group is environmentally conscious and may I add, highly emotional, then translate the consequence of those numbers into a message people can understand on an emotional level. Fiat did so in its impactful ads showing Pandas as crash-test dummies to drive home the message that Fiat cars are tested for a lower-impact on the environment (they had been certified the lowest CO2 emission car range that year by Jato Dynamics). Too creative? For marketing people in search of the smallest incremental difference to turn into a matter of life or death for the target group, lack the understanding of sustainability or choose to ignore it, the message often leaves Planet Reality and the result is an ad like the one for now-defunct car company Hummer, which claims its cars are “Thirsty for adventure. Not gas.” (The average fuel consumption being “only” 17 l/100 km). It’s a balancing act.

Effective therapy
I was asked to talk about the divide between sustainability and marketing at last year’s SB conference in London and I didn’t want to be the critical observer sitting with my arms crossed and mumbling that the world is shit. I wanted to offer a comforting word of advice when really I had none, so I did what you do when you don’t know the answer to a question — I googled it. I googled “Couples Therapy” and up came “5 Principles of Effective Couples Therapy” by Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I want to share those 5 principles with you, because their universal message connects with our silo thinking. I’m sure you’ll recognize some of them and do remember to share them with your significant other in marketing or sustainability:

Principle #1: Change the view of the relationship
You should stop playing the blame game. You are instead urged to understand the relationship for the situation that it is in and learn how the other party interacts.

Principle #2: Modify dysfunctional behaviour
Change the way in which you interact with one another. This means ensuring that there is no physical or psychological damage occurring.

Principle #3: Decrease emotional avoidance
Keeping private feelings to yourself will certainly cause further problems in a relationship. Growing emotionally distant is a dangerous place to be when trying to make a marriage or relationship work. You should focus on feeling more secure about being open and expressing feelings.

Principle #4: Improve communication
Learn how to communicate with one another effectively. You should also consider which types of communication might be more
effective considering the unique situation.

Principle #5: Promote strengths
Pointing out individual as well as relationship strengths assists in getting more enjoyment out of a relationship. Such a large portion of therapy focuses on problems, so rediscovering strengths assists you in staying positive and acknowledging the good.

I do hope these 5 principles will be the beginning of planetary bridge-building and the first steps on a healing journey that leads to a strong relationship with a shared vision. And if you can’t use these 5 principles in your work life you can always reuse them at home — that’s sustainability for you. Good luck with a brighter relationship and hopefully the beginning of a brighter planet.

ADDRESS

QUOTE BOX

When our children are looking back on the way we did business it will be as strange a notion as slavery is to us today. How could we be so oblivious to the harm we inflicted on people and the planet?

The work you put out there can either help make the world a better place or add to the ignorance. This responsibility is yours: What we need are big hearts and big ideas!

It’s about how you can align your passion with your compassion and your mission with a vision for a better world. It’s about leading people to a new sustainable and responsible reality they might not even know existed. Can you tell that story?

We, as the communications industry, have a pivotal role to play and may I add, that we, as the communications industry, have helped build and set in motion the wagon of consumerism and capitalism that is now driving us towards the edge of the cliff. We can solve these worldwide problems in a responsible, sustainable and engaging way